Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Maria Shriver have selected
several past and present Californians to be inducted into the new
California Museum Hall of Fame on Dec. 10. Among them is Jane Fonda,
political activist and actress.

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We consider her selection an affront to U.S. war veterans.

The state librarian nominated 180 potential inductees. Political
appointees at the California Arts Council and the California Museum
narrowed the list; the Schwarzeneggers approved the final selection. The
list includes Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), former Gov. Leland Stanford,
Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling, architect Julia Morgan and
photographer Dorothea Lange, among others.

We offer no assessment of Ms. Fonda's acting skills, which many consider
extraordinary. She remains a box office magnet and her film career has
made her wealthy.

We continue, however, to find despicable her service as a propaganda
tool for the enemy in the Vietnam War. Fonda spent two weeks in North
Vietnam in July 1972 as a guest of its Communist government. She made 10
radio broadcasts denouncing American political and military leaders as
"war criminals." She posed for photos, in one cheering North Vietnamese
antiaircraft gunners; in another wearing a helmet while looking through
the sights of one of their guns.

The Internet is aflame with stories about Fonda's staged meeting with
U.S. POWs. Many of these accounts are apocryphal and have been debunked
by POWs who were present. These bogus accounts are regrettable because
what Fonda did during that meeting and afterward needs no exaggeration
to shock anyone's conscience.

She did meet with eight POWs at a phony press conference. Under duress,
they condemned the U.S. war effort and uttered canned lines about how
well they had been treated by their captors. When she returned to the
U.S., she told the media, "(The POWS) assured me they were in good
health ... they expressed shame at what they had done."

When the war ended and the POWs returned, she slurred them as
"hypocrites and liars." As accounts of their treatment became public,
she defamed them as "military careerists and professional killers ...
war criminals according to the law."

Some may accuse us of harboring a grudge too long, saying that Fonda
finally did apologize for her behavior. Yet her misdeeds were so
deplorable that they cannot be forgotten after 36 years.

As for her alleged apology, she never made one. In 1988, when war
veterans were disrupting one of her film projects and in 2005, when she
was promoting her autobiography, she offered her "regrets" - but not to
the servicemen and the nation she dishonored, and only for posing in the
antiaircraft photos.

Apparently, the Schwarzeneggers, the state librarian, the state museum
and California Arts Council bureaucrats have forgotten or forgiven, if
they ever cared in the first place. That is a black mark on the
governor's legacy.